August 14, 2026: Last month, Russia published the Volhynia Files, which described Ukrainian nationalist groups that murdered Polish civilians during World War II. This data was published on Poland's National Day of Remembrance. The Volhynia massacres continue to be a controversial matter between Poland and Ukraine, with each nation having a different interpretation and different attitudes toward these violent events.

Poland and Ukraine are also a large part of an Eastern European area called the Bloodlands where over 14 million people were slaughtered in the 1930s and World War II. The victims included 6 million Poles (20% of Poland’s population) murdered by the Nazis (half of them Jews) and 3.3 million Ukrainians (11% of Ukraine’s population) who died in the Holodomor, or Great Famine. Dictator Josef Stalin wanted to exterminate Ukrainians and ethnic Poles who resisted collectivization in the Soviet Union. Both Russia and Germany sought once more to eliminate Poland and incorporate its territories into the victorious nations.

Once the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, they proceeded to create 4.2 million victims of the Soviet Hunger Plan. The German plan included the deaths of up to 45 million Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Czechs as part of a plan for the land impoverished of their populations to be replaced by German farmers and tradesmen. Another 700,000 civilians, mostly Belarusians and Poles, were murdered by the Germans as reprisals during the German occupation of Belarus and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Finally, there was the Holocaust that killed 5.4 million European Jews, plus another 300,000 deaths outside the Bloodlands.

Another factor in the history of the Bloodlands is the Cossacks, who for centuries were mounted warriors living on the fringes of the expanding Russian empire. Most of them were Russian but, in southern Russia, the region known as Ukraine also produced Cossacks, who fought nations to the west like Poland and Turks and Tartars to the south and east. Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian Cossacks have been used to augment the police force, while many joined the Russian army to fight in Ukraine. Over the last few years, a growing number of Russian Cossacks have been uniting with Ukrainian Cossacks to oppose Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Earlier, Russia, desperate to find more manpower to reinforce its troops in Ukraine, turned to its small Cossack population. Russia made a deal with the Cossack leadership to persuade the millions of Ukrainian and Russian Cossacks living in Russia to support the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Prior to 2024, Russia had not sought to recruit Cossacks. This was part of an effort to maintain and improve good relations with Cossacks in Russia. Eventually, more than 50,000 Cossacks had served in the Russian forces in Ukraine or the forces gathered to push Ukrainian forces out of Russia’s Kursk province. The Ukrainians entered Kursk in August. Russia also used 12,000 North Korean mercenaries for its Kursk counterattack.